Darryl Pinckney

Darryl Pinckney, a longtime contributor to The New York Review of Books, is the author of a novel, High Cotton, and, in the Alain Locke Lecture Series, Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature. His new book is Blackballed: The Black Vote and US Democracy.

Can Themba's "The Suit," a sparsely told tale of betrayal, was adapted for the stage in South Africa in the early 1990s. Peter Brook's version is now at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, in the Harvey Theater.

The Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial in Washington, DC looks like heroic sculpture from the China of Chairman Mao. InThe Mountaintop, a play by Katori Hall now on Broadway, Dr. King is offered yet another tribute his memory could maybe have done without. In Hall’s well-meaning, but naive play about an imagined conversation between King and a maid at the motel where he stayed on the night before he was killed, King’s last hours on earth become an occasion for tribal laughter and warm black feelings. The Mountaintop is so focused on reconciling us--and him--to his death, that Hall seems uninterested in how she might be exploiting King’s legacy.